If it's directional just enter the planetary system pointed away from the planet you wish to visit. If it's omnidirectional make sure there's something large in-between your spaceship and the target planet to protect it (i.e. come out of warp on the other side of the sun).

simplicimus:President Merkin Muffley: A. OFNB. The people that make this claim don't understand warp theory. The ship isn't traveling anywhere.

So, foldspace from Dune?

The Alcubierre Drive means the space surrounding the ship technically isn't in motion. It's creating a bubble of space that moves faster than light outside of the bubble surrounding the ship and it rides on that. The energy released when that bubble is collapsed and space returns to normal is responsible for the radiation hell that kills off whoever is waiting for you.

That's how I always figured it would work, but apparently the Alucard drive doesn't require any conventional velocity. The warp effect creates all the motion, and even if you could get a speed boost by running the impulse drive at the same time, it would probably be negligible.

Of course, it's an open question whether the Alsace-Lorraine drive is even physically possible and not just a mathematical oddity, so we may end up falling back on another kind of warp drive that requires impulse velocity to work.

StopLurkListen:Don't the Star Trek rules of their fiction mention that engaging warp drive too close to a planet results in lots of bad things happening?

...only have a passing knowledge of Star Trek, not up on all the details

What may possibly be the worst episode of ST:TNG deals with a biatchy alien scientist who argues that warp drives are doing damage to the structure of the universe. She proves her thesis, and (thankfully) kills herself in the process. So, after that, the Federation imposed a speed limit of Warp Factor 4, which the Enterprise ignored at will, until they finally mentioned in passing that they'd gotten a new warp coil that didn't fark up the space-time continuum anymore.

Even the show's producers have admitted what a mistake that plotline was.

Fano:GAT_00: The arrival effect of Alcubierre drives when they collapse their warp field has been known for like 3 years now.

Way to stay on top of things Daily Fail.

I was trying to recall how long this has been known.

Also, it takes the entire power of the universe to charge up, I think.

More people have been working on the idea of the Alcubierre Drive. They now think it is actually possible to create the bubble. But yeah, the original formulas showed it to require nearly infinite energy.

GAT_00:Fano: GAT_00: The arrival effect of Alcubierre drives when they collapse their warp field has been known for like 3 years now.

Way to stay on top of things Daily Fail.

I was trying to recall how long this has been known.

Also, it takes the entire power of the universe to charge up, I think.

More people have been working on the idea of the Alcubierre Drive. They now think it is actually possible to create the bubble. But yeah, the original formulas showed it to require nearly infinite energy.

I stand corrected after reading the article that it would only take the equivalent energy of blowing up Jupiter, which is a teensy bit better.

Fano:GAT_00: The arrival effect of Alcubierre drives when they collapse their warp field has been known for like 3 years now.

Way to stay on top of things Daily Fail.

I was trying to recall how long this has been known.

Also, it takes the entire power of the universe to charge up, I think.

Well, it's all theoretical at this point, so there's no experimental proof of any of these theories being correct. Yet.

Until recently, the estimate was that you'd need an equivalent "Jupiter" mass's worth of energy to warp space; more recently was someone who theorized a differently-shaped warp bubble resulting in much less energy - a "Voyager probe" mass's worth of energy.

There will be experiments soon on a tiny scale. Fascinating, probably a dead end, but yay science! Sometimes you get surprised.

StopLurkListen:Until recently, the estimate was that you'd need an equivalent "Jupiter" mass's worth of energy to warp space; more recently was someone who theorized a differently-shaped warp bubble resulting in much less energy - a "Voyager probe" mass's worth of energy.

Whoop-dee-doo. Warping space enough for FTL still requires "exotic matter," a.k.a. "sci-fi pixie dust." On the other hand, warp drive would still be useful as an inertial damper even if you couldn't use it to break the light barrier. Being able to accelerate macroscopic objects to relativistic speeds without all those nasty g-forces would be pretty sweet.